By Ashley Hall
When building your dream team of customer success professionals there are, of course, the standard credentials and background you look for in terms of years of experience and types of previous roles. Those qualifiers allow you to trust your candidate will arrive with enough background to be an impactful and qualified contributor to your team. There are other key skill sets and mentalities, however, that I find even more essential when hiring for customer success teams that really allow you to identify your stand-out candidates.
Innate curiosity and the ability to be investigative are key skill sets I always like to interview for because as CSM you are consistently meeting new teams and contacts and are required to get to know them and their needs quickly. Being naturally curious leads to asking many great questions, allowing you to surface client goals and needs. These skills really aid you to know your client teams in a professional sense and partnering that curiosity with being investigative also allows your CSMs to watch for red flags or churn warning signs. Clients may not always be up front with feedback or when they might be shopping around for other solutions so having investigative and curious staff can support you in surfacing and resolving those red flags as quickly as possible.
Empathy is a massively valuable, intangible skill of a customer success professional. As your company's key relationship with the client base, having honest CSMs who empathize with their clients can provide the most authentic feedback back to your business. Not only does empathy serve your company, but most importantly provides comfort to your clients. Rather than working with a CSM who is simply checking things off their to do list, clients know and feel when they are working with an empathetic partner who is genuinely invested in their success.
Persistence is a trait that is super hard to teach - it can seem like you have it or you don’t. Without a doubt there will be both customers and colleagues that a CSM will have to chase down for responses and partnership. Excellent CSMs don’t get discouraged by this chase, but rather employ creative reach out solutions to work around the challenge and create the connection regardless.
It goes without saying that candidates with a positive attitude will stand out amongst the rest. CSMs have many challenges to sort through throughout the days and weeks, and cannot let tough customer situations bring their mood down for long. Optimistic candidates who can power through challenges and side step tough conversations from bringing them down will always provide levity and spirit to the rest of the team.
These intangible skills are key in finding standout candidates to compliment and build your team. Years of experience can only provide so much. However, those years of experience in partnership with being naturally investigative, persistent, and a having consistently positive attitude will always be key for hiring in my teams.
Want to build a top performing team? The Success League is a Customer Success consulting firm that offers a CS Leadership program which features classes including Hiring Top Performers and Planning a Team Structure. Visit TheSuccessLeague.io for these and our other classes and business coaching offerings.
Ashley Hall - Ashley loves to lead account management and success teams; from training newbies to building processes out of chaos. Ashley is one of the founding advisors to The Success League, and serves as a regular instructor for the company's CSM Training Program. She is a Director of Customer Success at Stackla, and brings her work experiences to her articles and classes. Ashley holds a BA from the University of Colorado, lives in San Francisco, and enjoys global travel.